Ellen Craft was a slave who posed a white man to escape the South.
24 diagrams to help you eat healthier.
Social issues in the Golden Globes.
Where is the suckiest place to live — North Korea, Nigeria or Syria?
13 thoughts on “SL 645”
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Apt. 11d 
The first two links both go to the escaping slave story. Which may be what you wanted because it’s a great story and one that I’d not heard of before.
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Fixed. That was a good story, wasn’t it? We talked about it at dinner tonight.
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Wikipedia has pictures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_and_William_Craft
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She looked kind of like an adult Harry Potter.
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That is an interesting story, about the Crafts. It’s also interesting that the Crafts and/or their supporters evidently wanted to put the darker-skinned participant front and center, whereas the writer of the linked article wants to put the female participant front and center. Truly there are no facts unmediated by interpretation. (Or at least, the uninterpreted facts are generally unrecoverable.)
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Thanks for that great story. A terrific way to start off my morning.
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That is the most amazing food link ever. Seriously, so much good information in one place. I sent it to 25 people and linked to it on FB.
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Where is the suckiest place to live — North Korea, Nigeria or Syria?
North Korea, just because it is more evenly sucky. Boko Haram is only active in the Northern part of Nigeria and it is a pretty big country. If you’re in the South (particularly the Southwest, away from the oil area which has a bit of civil unrest), you’re probably pretty safe, albeit poor by Western standards.
There are also still normal pockets of Syria, mostly the places still under Assad’s control in the West, centered on Damascus and the coast. But the civil war might still intrude in those places, so I would think that Southern Nigeria is still safer (also I visited Syria in 2005–before the war–and it was really nice! Not that I wanted to live there and have no rights. But the people were over-the-top friendly and it was filled with amazing sites with almost no crowds of tourists to ruin it. To the extend that Syria might still exist in those pockets, it is not very sucky at all)
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We’ve had a couple of Nigerian priests locally and while it sounds poor, it doesn’t sound miserable.
One of the visiting priests was telling a funny (to me) story about how when he was in seminary in Nigeria and had been accepted to a (fairly conservative) Catholic college in the US, his friends and family were telling him not to go, because they were sure that he was off to just party in the US, because that’s all we ever do here. Presumably, if Nigeria was a complete and utter hell hole, they would have been begging him to go.
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For the text, “Running a 1000 miles to freedom”
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/menu.html
(as well as other slave narratives)
I am truly thankful the access to all this information. As you say, an amazing story and through the internet, we can all have access to it, and not just serious historians.
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If you like the Crafts’ story, can I interest you in some Harriet Jacobs? She lived in an attic for 7 years to thwart her lecherous master’s attempts to rape her. She was seriously badass.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Jacobs/hj-site-index.htm
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The Smithsonian magazines version of the article —
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-escape-from-slavery-of-ellen-and-william-craft-497960/?no-ist
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A friend lived in Pyongyang for a couple of years. She said the expats drank a lot.
A different friend lived in Lagos (Nigeria) right around the turn of the century. Lots of dead bodies is what she found most remarkable. On the upside, she greatly enjoyed the motorcycle trips around parts of West Africa she took with other friends who lived there.
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